Jonas Bohlin

17 March 2012

Jonas Bohlin

Being a designer with an artistical approach to his work, Jonas Bohlin always crosses the borderlines — but without losing the connections. The connections to architecture, to functions, to life itself.

Since the beginning of his career the mixture of emotion and common sense in design has been the very means for his success. As much as you never can separate a design’s form from its function, you’re not able to distinguish its emotional contents from its value.

Jonas Bohlin started off by making a kind of scandalous success in terms of offended Swedish functionalism at the 1981 graduation show at Konstfack, the National College of Arts, Craft and Design, in Stockholm. We never quite recoverd from the shock his chair "Concrete" created in the Swedish design community. Being meant as a piece of sculpture in an artistic installation, the chair of steel and concrete was obviuosly epitomizing a Swedish idea of post-modernism, why it was produced in a limited edition, and is currently a collector’s item.

Bohlin’s works range from furniture, light fittings, glass and textiles, to art objects and installations. It also comprises huge projects, like the creation of a new design education or an eighteen months long happening, comprising the build of a traditional, Swedish boat for fuor rowers, and climaxing in a three month rowing session on the channels of Europe, from Stockholm to Paris.

That project was called LIV, the Swedish word for life (also Latin for 54 — the total number of rowers!), and Jonas Bohlin was truly "rowing for life". Not only his own, as it came out, but also that of his wife and of his son, who was born almost on the same day as the succeding exhibition LIV opened in Stockholm in the spring of 1997.

LIV also gave birth to a lot of new Bohlin design. A range of objects which are natural new members of the big family of things — members but still individuals. To me Jonas Bohlin’s design always have a very sociable quality — they are great friends in an otherwise mixed company.

Ulf BeckmanEditor, FORM Design Magazine1998-07-01

CURRICULUM VITAEJonas Bohlin, born 1953GCE at A level from technical high school , Stockholm 1974Examined Interior Architect from Konstfack, The National College of Art, Craft and Design, Stockholm 1981JB is married and has one child (a son born in ’97).He lives and works in Stockholm.

ENTERPRISES Jonas Bohlin Architectual Office 1983-Art -and design gallery "Stockholm Mobile" 1985-87Professor, Beckman’s School of Design 1988-96Head of Form course, Beckman’s School of Design 1992-96Chairman of SIR, The National Association of Swedish Interior Architects 1991-93Associate of The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts 1997-Member of Brindfors Design 1997-Jonas Bohlin Design Company 1998-Board member of The National Museum & Prins Eugen’s Valdemarsudde 2000

PRIZES/AWARDS/GRANTSScholarship of Konstfack, The National College of Art, Craft and Design 1981Scholarship of Svensk Form, The SwedishSociety of Crafts and Design 1981Excellent Swedish Design, Honorary Mention 1983State Cultural Grant 1984Grant from The Estrid Ericson Foundation 1985Grant from The Swedish Board of Fine Arts 1986 The Georg Jensen Prize 1988Best Interior of The Year, chosen by Forum, magazine of SIR 1989Excellent Swedish Design, Honorary Mention 1992Project Grant from The Swedish State Fund for the Arts 1994The Major Grant of The Swedish State Fund for the Arts 1997Furniture of the Year, magazine of Sköna Hem 19971900th century in Architeture, magazine FORUM närmiljö 2000Excellent Swedish Design Prize 2001